BUSINESS STANDARD SMART BUSINESS WEBINAR ON THE WAY FORWARD FOR MSMEs IN 2021

A webinar, titled ‘The Year Ahead: Are MSMEs in India ready to leap forward in 2021?’ was organised by Business Standard Smart Business and Integrated Association of Micro Small & Medium Enterprise of India, Delhi on December 23. Speakers at the webinar talked about how the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) can take advantage of various inexpensive technologies to leap forward to 2021. Gaurav Swarup, MD, Marshall Machines Ltd., said MSMEs have a solution at a time when Covid has virtually devastated the global economy. It is a very simple, very easily implementable solution. It is called low hanging fruits of industry 4.0, he said. He allayed apprehensions that industry 4.0 is only for capital-equipped large industries. He said technologies such as universal machine monitoring, preventive maintenance and close loop auto corrected production could be easily accessed by MSMEs to get higher return on investment. Ashok Saigal, Co-Chairman, CII MSME & MD Frontier Technologies, said most MSMEs are run by first generation entrepreneurs who are by their very nature optimists. Because of this and also projections by global agencies, all MSMEs are looking forward to 2021 to be better than what was predicted. He emphasised that Atmanirbhar Bharat (Self Reliant India) is the first step to go into the global supply chain and must be supplemented by Sare Jahan Se Achha (Best in the World) to produce world class products. Mohammad Athar (Saif) , Partner -economic development and infrastructure, PwC India- said, 95 per cent Indian MSMEs are currently stuck as micro enterprises. He said, they need to graduate from micro to small in size to have necessary capital and resources to invest in infrastructure, technology and innovation.